Something About England

07.55am, Brighton

Just a bus-ride away: a hope-spun summer, long past. Here: the chill spring’s long present is a higgledy-piggledy hotch-potch of seat-squabbling and the fear of inconsequential failure, a hoi-polloi sweat of cramped carriages, of suitcases bruising shins, staccato blares of needless information, the salt-and-vinegar crunch of Englishness. Hope lies forward (towards First Class), regret to the rear.  It’s all about to pull away.

10.10am Euston/The Em*rates

Another train (What does the song say? We crawl in the dark sometimes and think too much, then we fill our heads with the craziest things that only break our hearts…) The phone sits in front of me, Coleridge on the stained plastic table next to it. From his reason to mine: I don’t know why I travel. Misanthropy. Misogyny. I know: miss the bloody point. A thousand such journeys have touched me with my own separation. Less than a thousand to go, probably a lot less. I open a magazine, read that RLS wrote Kidnapped on cocaine. In four days. Easy.

10.20am, Stevenage (or somewhere like that)

Cheap brick and tarnished wood and scowling plastic. Didactic, polemical, proselytising: be nineteen with me, in the face of this life-emptying, hateful vacuum of residential units and industrial estates and out-of-town stores grinding commerce from community, leer from love, meaning from…

I stare at her photograph: she’s gone for the Mona Lisa look, achieved instead the blur-eyed, three-tequila stare of a Paris Hilton emerging from her world and, momentarily, joining ours. Shit. The lid of this bloody coffee won’t fit. Was it ten years ago? Was it?? When I was so wood-chipper sliced and washing-machine spun by feelings I never knew had a place? Jesus.

10.30ish Milton Keynes, possibly

Caravan park. Ragged horses. Fields of urine-yellow rape. Infectious. Growing.

Can I connect with this direct intuition of truth, this inward beholding, this vision, this dim-glimmering moon? (his phrase, not mine, I’m not entirely plagiaristic, not yet). No. My reason isn’t his reason. My reason is cold, rational, my reason stays in the house, curtains half-closed, the smiling white world beyond creeping in like a ghost, like Martin Peters, like … I’m not a genius (I’m a free man.) Prisoner of thought and desire, it’s obvious, surely? Fuck, yeah: they’ll never know just how much! Prisoner of thought, of weight, of lust, of history. Prisoner: merely prisoner.

Must be gone 11, Rugby

There’s a tiny bridge, there – through the smeared virgin window, across the field – attempting to swallow a puddle-thick stream, arched, alone, rarely troubled for a hundred years, glimpsed and forgotten, quickly gone. A thousand years, perhaps.

11, 11.30ish, Stafford

Fields flooded, forlorn. Flat, polite plains of middle England. OCD hedgerows treated by pylons, trapped-electric, spiteful carriers of faith.

And back again, ten years ago: a planet’s worth of suffocation and self-loathing and want, a child, untutored and lost, an old man racked by adolescent longing, an adult in name only. Longing for whatever’s there. Longing for someone singular, exciting, someone more clever. Longing, yes, and dreading.

(Anger, such anger: when she pointed it out, I felt pinned, butterfly-on-wheel pointed, painting, panting, pining, p…)

Some time around midday, Runcorn

Gruff of the North. Promises of jigsaws joined on Christmas floors. Dreams of magic carpets and prayers answered. Soon it’ll be time to stop. Soon she’ll dim into the past. Soon there’ll be joy and love and communion, the laughter of alcohol and friendship, the renewed wonder of just being. Simple. Being simple.

Nearly there.

But then again I … no, I could go on like this all day. I could stay on this train forever. So one more station. Just one. And then a bus-ride home.